Black Keys relish their intimate last concert of the year at Milwaukee's Eagles Ballroom

The Black Keys never seemed like they were built for arenas — but that’s where they wound up.

That’s not a knock against the pride of Akron, Ohio, the rock duo of singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney. They were just always drawn to the straightforward and raw sounds of the Delta blues, not the kind of bombast and grandeur that rock bands often deploy to pack huge venues.

Yet despite — and because of — that deceptively rigid framework, the Black Keys were an engaging, down-to-earth contrast to their peers in the early aughts. And thanks to a slew of undeniable earworms, their Milwaukee gigs in the past decade included the Bradley Center, Fiserv Forum and headlining Summerfest's amphitheater.

But not this week.

On Wednesday, the Black Keys were back in town, at the 3,500-person-capacity Eagles Ballroom at the Rave. They weren’t exactly “back to the basement,” as Auerbach suggested about halfway through an 18-song, 83-minute set. But the band and fans clearly relished the comparative intimacy, a setting suited to their visceral, back-to-basics sound.

Not that the band — supplemented Wednesday by another guitarist, percussionist, bassist, keyboardist, and a hometown friend on acoustic guitar for “Weight of Love” — ever sounded basic. That was especially the case for Auerbach. Anyone enamored with the Black Keys' catalog is likely drawn to Auerbach's obsession with guitar tone and tension, and Wednesday, he let his guitar geekdom run free, playfully tinkering with the recorded arrangements to consistently intriguing ends.

For show opener "I Got Mine," from 2008's "Attack & Release," Auerbach's guitar contrasts were more pronounced, shifting suddenly from aggressive, instrument-jerking riffing to smooth purrs. Then, on subsequent song "Gold on the Ceiling," from 2011's "El Camino," Auerbach added a little tang to one of the band's best-known guitar parts, cruising his hand up and down the neck with a glass slide.

And Auerbach's climactic guitar licks for "Fever" from 2014's "Turn Blue" were crunchier live than on the album, giving way to psychedelic washes far dreamier than what had been conjured in the studio.

For his part, Carney held down the low end frequently with a heavy touch, and drew some of the most engaged reactions of the night for simple but effective building beats, like for "She's Long Gone" from 2010's "Brothers."

Carney was often fixated on his bandmate from behind the kit, and Auerbach in turn played some of his rowdier licks seemingly just for him. But Wednesday's set unfortunately lacked a highlight from some of those big gigs in town in recent years, when the backing touring band was excused to leave just Auerbach and Carney rocking hard together.

The closest they came to resembling that less-is-more dynamic Wednesday was with a simmering performance of "El Camino" highlight "Little Black Submarines." It began with just Auerbach, his initial note-cascading noodling on acoustic guitar channeling a "Stairway to Heaven" vibe, before he took on the first verse and chorus alone. For the second verse and chorus, more band members joined in — Carney, reserved on drums, plus a soft touch from percussion and keys — before the full band roared in for the final third.

Before playing "Little Black Submarines" as part of Wednesday's two-song encore (the other song was "Lonely Boy," also from "El Camino"), Auerbach noted that these would be the last two songs the Black Keys would play in 2023. He also said that there will be a "next time" in Milwaukee — although in terms of where they'll play, "next time" almost certainly will not be as intimate as "this time."

3 takeaways from the Black Keys’ Milwaukee concert, including opener Colony House

• The Black Keys’ underplay Wednesday was par for the course for WLUM-FM (102.1)’s annual Big Snow Show. For the past 17 years, bookings for the Big Snow Show often have included arena-level acts playing the Eagles Ballroom. And there’s more Big Snow Show coming up: Buzzy British alt-rockers Lovejoy are headlining Night 2 (of two) Thursday.

• The Rave has some of the best Halloween decorations in the city year after year, so why bother putting them away with Christmas around the corner? The Rave kept some of its sinister animatronics out of storage, adorning them with tinsel, Christmas lights and the like — reminiscent of Jack Skellington’s Christmas takeover from “The Nightmare Bedore Christmas.”

• Cry “nepo babies” if you want when it comes to Colony House, the Black Keys’ opener Wednesday. But this is a case where the apple falls pretty far from the tree. A primary part the Tennessee four-piece band’s appeal live are singer and guitarist Caleb Chapman — whose rambunctious energy compensated for often inaudible lyrics Wednesday — and his drummer brother Will, a consistent powerhouse whether he was banging through the crunchy ear-rattler “O Ya” or the doo-wop-seasoned “You Know It.” Their father is a well-established, award-winning artist, with a sound drastically different from Colony House: Christian singer-songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman.

The Black Keys’ Eagles Ballroom setlist in Milwaukee

1. “I Got Mine”

2. “Gold on the Ceiling”

3. “Your Touch”

4. “Tighten Up”

5. “Have Love, Will Travel” (Richard Berry cover)

6. ”Crawling Kingsnake” (cover originally recorded by Big Joe Williams)

7. “Next Girl”

8. “Lo/Hi”

9. “Everlasting Light”

10. “Heavy Soul”

11. “Weight of Love”

12. “Howlin’ for You”

13. ”Fever”

14. ”Ten Cent Pistol”

15. “Wild Child”

16. “She’s Long Gone”

17. “Little Black Submarines”

18. “Lonely Boy”

Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on X at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The Black Keys relish intimate last concert of 2023 in Milwaukee